Recently I've been out hunting for new hosting - I think it's time to go dedicated! One of the top priorities on my shopping list is a UK based ip address to aid in my UK targeted SEO campaigns.

I came across Web Fusion. Their prices are unbeatable and some of the features are just perfect:

The site I'm covering today is a fantastic example of what a skilled Joomla designer can do with a solid brief and some great components. The site I'm talking about is House Finder UK.

I came across this site a few weeks ago and couldn't believe it was a joomla site. At first glance you would have thought it was a totally custom job, the type that is common in this market. But as you delve into the site you realise that joomla has handled the brief perfectly.

Design wise it's just perfect - clean, simple and easy to navigate. Feature wise it's stunning, everything you could need from free property listings to information on property investments.

This may appear quite a bold statement, but it's true - a totally standard joomla site will often suffer poor rankings in comparison to a flat html file competitor. This is down to the fact that with joomla it's hard to polish the seo basics such as title tags, SEF urls, meta descriptions and 'noindex' robot tags.

It's fair to say that of the four problems I've mentioned three of them can be handled using alternative components to sh404SEF. The point I want to get across is that sh404SEF can do all of these, far easier, and also allow you to control your title tags - the single most important factor in SERPs rankings.

Control over title tags is lacking in joomla, severely lacking. If you want to invest some time in your site today, install sh404SEF. Once you have properly configured sh404SEF, and gained some key inlinks, you will see a marked increase in traffic to your site.

We have been long standing users of OpenSEF to create joomla search engine friendly urls, mainly because when we first started fooling around with SEF urls it was the best component out there - some would say SEF Advanced from Sakic was better but it certainly wasn't $40s better!

Over the past year or so OpenSEF hasn't been updated and it's now clear that it's abandonware. This left us in a sticky situation as we, and many others, needed a replacement.

After a great deal of research it was obvious that the only two contenders were JoomSEF from Artio and sh404SEF from Yannick at extensions.siliana.net. Looking into the two components further sealed the deal - sh404SEF is far superior, the sheer amount of features and plugins for it are unbelievable. We'll save the details for a later blog post dedicated to sh404SEF, it's worth it.

So having just finished the new site I was going over the backend and tidying everything up - deleting unused categories and content, clearing the cache etc. I realised that the page impressions statistics were going to be way out of line so needed to be reset.

I had presumed that this would be a feature built into joomla that I hadn't yet come across, but searching the menus turned nothing up. Before I headed into the depths of phpMyAdmin to hunt out and clear the relevant database table I thought I'd do Googling. Luckily I came across Joomla Stats Cleaner!

Well the site's all setup (nearly) and all that's left to do is to start using it! So this is the first post on the new qxdigital blog, I'd like to use this to explain a little about what's going to be happening here and what you can expect in the future...

First a look back... We used to do joomla web design projects but soon realized that it's just not worth spending the time creating great sites just to let them go! We've now decided to concentrate on making top quality sites of our own and monetize them via affiliate marketing.